Drug trafficking and political disintegration in Colombia could confront the United States, if present trends continue, with the most serious foreign and security policy crisis in the Western Hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s. The first question is why Colombia matters. U.S. policy toward Colombia has been driven to a large extent by counter-narcotics considerations, but the situation in that South American country is a national security as much as a drug policy problem. Colombia is a strategically important country. It is South America's fourth largest country in area and the second largest in population. It is the only South American country with coastlines on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and it is contiguous to the Caribbean basin, Central America, Venezuela and its oil fields, and Panama and the Canal. Colombia also has some of the largest untapped petroleum reserves in the Western Hemisphere. Colombia's trajectory will also influence the direction of broader trends in the unstable Andean region and beyond.

Drug trafficking and political disintegration in Colombia could confront the United States, if present trends continue, with the most serious foreign and security policy crisis in the Western Hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s. The first question is why Colombia matters. U.S. policy toward Colombia has been driven to a large extent by counter-narcotics considerations, but the situation in that South American country is a national security as much as a drug policy problem. Colombia is a strategically important country. It is South America's fourth largest country in area and the second largest in population. It is the only South American country with coastlines on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and it is contiguous to the Caribbean basin, Central America, Venezuela and its oil fields, and Panama and the Canal. Colombia also has some of the largest untapped petroleum reserves in the Western Hemisphere. Colombia's trajectory will also influence the direction of broader trends in the unstable Andean region and beyond.

U.S. policy toward Colombia has been driven to a large extent by counter-narcotics considerations, but the evolving situation in that South American country confronts the United States with as much of a national security as a drug policy problem. Colombia is a geostrategically important country, whose trajectory will influence broader trends in the Andean region and beyond. Colombian Labyrinth examines the sources of instability in the country; the objectives, strategy, strengths, and weaknesses of the government, guerrillas, and paramilitaries and the balances among them; and the effects of the current U.S. assistance program. Possible scenarios and futures for Colombia are laid out, with implications for both the United States and neighboring countries. The authors find that instability in Colombia stems from the interaction and synergies of the underground drug economy and armed challenges to the state's authority. Solutions to the core problem--the weakness of the Colombian State--must focus on resolving the broader set of political-military challenges that result from the convergence of drug trafficking and insurgency. The authors recommend that Colombia's military and institutional capabilities be improved to enable the Colombian government to regain control of the countryside and that, at the same time, the United States work with Colombia's neighbors to contain the risk of spillover and regional destabilization.

US policy toward Columbia has been driven to a large extent by counter-narcotics, but the evolving situation in that South American country confronts the US with as much of a national security as a drug policy problem. This work examines the sources of instability in the country.

This book studies a significant event in US relations with Latin America, shedding light on the role of dependent states and their foreign policy agency in the process by which local concerns become intertwined with the dominant state’s foreign policy. Plan Colombia was a large-scale foreign aid programme through which the US intervened in the internal affairs of Colombia, by invitation. It proved to be one of the major successes of US foreign policy, and has been credited with stemming a potentially catastrophic security failure of the Colombian state. This book discusses the strategies and practices deployed by the Colombian government to influence US foreign policy decision making at the bureaucratic, legislative and executive levels, and is a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of small power agency. Giving a clearer insight into the decision making processes in both the US and Colombia, this book founds its argument on solid empirical analysis assembled from interviews of the major players in the events including: Andres Pastrana, President of Colombia; Thomas Pickering, US State Department; Arturo Valenzuela, Senior Director for Inter-American Affairs at the NSA; General Barry McCaffrey, the US ‘Drug Czar’; and Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Approaching the events in question from a bottom-up theoretical perspective that puts the emphasis on the facts of the case, this book will be of great interest to academics, students and policy makers in the field of foreign policy analysis, US foreign policy studies, and Latin American studies.

This book explores the factors that influence violent rebellious political organisations to transform into other entities, such as political parties, criminal organisations and terrorist organisations. From the end of the Second World War until 1990, many events in the world centred on the bipolar struggle between the United States and the USSR. Although there were numerous civil wars occurring during the Cold War era, many of these conflicts went virtually unnoticed unless they were linked to the Cold War struggle for ideological dominance. In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, the number of intra-state conflicts was prevalent around the globe. Along with the occurrence of civil wars, a variety of violent political movements also developed. Examining cases from Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, this book addresses how violent political movements transform during and after conflict into new types of organisations using the collective political violence transformative (CPVT) model. The study uses a combination of pre-existing literature from the fields of sociology and political science, archival research, and interviews with movement members (former and active) conducted by the author. In studying the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin, the Spear of the Nation (MK) and the African National Congress (ANC), the Abu Sayyaf Group and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), Transforming Violent Political Movements paints a picture of organisations that have to respond to their environments to survive. This book will be of much interest to students of political violence, terrorism, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR.